For the past five years I've gathered statistics on how many
trick-or-treaters have come by on Halloween. If you want to read
about that, check out posts from last year or the year before.
This post is about how I track those stats, and how I don't.

Every year I'm tempted to build some fancy system to collect and
manage these statistics. Wouldn't it be fun, say, to wire up some
Raspberry Pi sensor that automatically counts and tweets running
totals? It wouldn't be that hard and sounds like fun.

The problem is making something like that reliable. You'd have to
do all the un-fun stuff, like testing and contingency planning. If
your baseline is a clipboard, paper, and a ball point pen, your bar
for failure is basically "never". Even if I did build something
fancy I'd still end up doing backup tallies by hand. At this human
scale, the tech ends up being a fun gimmick, not required.

It reminds me of a story from friend [Tony]. Tony
and his brother Tom run a giant gaming convention every year,
the Evolution Championship Series (Evo for short). It's a
multi-day convention in Las Vegas that attracts something like ten
thousand participants. They run the whole thing with their two
other founders and some friends — I'm sure they have some
paid help now, but the four guys are the main ones. It's impressive.

Given that Tony and Tom are strong engineers, I figured this would
be a slick high-tech operation. Not so.

Tony said they've tried tech at various points and it wasn't worth
it. It's easy to see why that is tempting: they have multiple
mobile coordinators that need access to changing, shared information,
like brackets and schedules. But what they've tried has let them
down. Usually it's not the hard parts that fail, but the basics,
like batteries and wireless connectivity. So they still run this
off of printouts and voice communications (cell phones/walkie-talkies)
and periodic data dumps.

And so, this year I'll be gathering my Halloween stats like I always
have: clipboard, pen, and a hand-held tally counter. The data
will still be timely and accurate.

Two postscripts. First, Please stop spreading that
NASA Space Pen story. I'm sure you've heard it: how do you write in zero G?
the wasteful Americans commissioned a multi-million dollar space
pen project; the scrappy can-do Russians used pencils. Well, this
story has been debunked by the good people at Snopes.

And second, I'd like to plug Tony and Tom's "day job", Stonehearth.
I think of it as Starcraft meets Minecraft. I am so eager to play
it when it lands.